Ordinarily, Onions avoided talking to the locals. Desha, however, caught him outside the hardware store.

Waving her slender hand, tanned and strong, she said, "We're intrigued by your names."

Onions felt the weight of that "we", a cat's cradle of small-town culture as the town of Mutters, Colorado, eyeballed him and his brother Coal, two strangers just trying to pick up a little cash, then keep on rolling.

As a sop, he offered a bit of culture, "European Christmas tradition: naughty children get coal and onions." He finished up with a memorized bit of Magyar, Merry Christmas in Hungarian. That usually confused even those wise to ethnicity because his last name, Matuszewicz, was Polish.

With a suggestive lift of her unruly eyebrows, Desha asked, "And who exactly was naughty?"

Those eyebrows rewarded his decision to talk to her, so Onions trotted out another version that Coal had invented for rude adults. "A department-store Santa Claus, Dad was still wearing his costume when my brother was born on Christmas eve, and I came along just past midnight. Dad said that even coal and onions in his stocking couldn't have dampened his joy. So, those names remind us all how blessed that night was."

By the set of her jaw, Desha hadn't bought a word of it, yet the shutters had been thrown open in her green eyes, turning them as pearlescent as tropical surf. She'd decided something, but what?

She gripped his elbow with a fist that had reined its share of horses and whatever else they ranched out here. Surprisingly, she whispered, "That's what I'll tell the others. But I want the truth of the matter. What you and Coal haven't said out loud in a really long time."

The story explained why the word "Mom" was so complicated for him. It slipped out more easily than he expected.

"Mom was a junky. Her mother died of an overdose, and her father, ..." Onions felt a John-Wayne face-swipe coming, but he held it to a shrug. "Her father got her addicted so he could get to her more easily, then Mom got pregnant. Her father got mad, but we're Catholic, and that matters even to junkies. At the public shelter, they took the baby after he was born on Christmas Eve, after she named him. 'Coal' because God used him to punish her. Soon, she was pregnant again. This time, her father beat her near to death before the cops killed him. I was born Christmas Day."

Breathing deeply, Onions readied himself for the good part. "She got clean. I was six before she proved to the state that they could trust us to her. It was a hard return --" He jabbed a glare at Desha to dent the judgment that usually built up in people's eyes, but she only listened. "Unlike they do on TV and movies, our foster families treated us well. Coal and I didn't like leaving them, but we didn't have a choice when she took us back."

He breathed again, more smoothly. "Lord love her and us, she kept at it." He realized that he didn't have to tell the good part after all. He and Coal lived it, and if other people couldn't see that, tough on them.

Desha stared back, the tint in her eyes fading toward Baja surf again.

"I'm sorry for lying," he said.

"I'm not," she said.

And Onions decided that "rolling" out of town really was not in his best interests.

Louie strolls. Louie grins around a wooden toothpick tucked into the left corner of his mouth. Louie waves at people he's never seen before, and a lot of them wave back. After all, this event he's affecting a saunter through is a political event, and politics -- Louie quotes from the preface to his thesis, the only part he's actually written -- "Politics occurs only inside, among, and about people."

But how well do those people have to know each other? Politics requires a connection among people, but how close? Friends? Acquaintances? Or can strangers make politics together? He, of course, intended to ignore the aphorism about politics and strange bedfellows, though he might get some comic relief -- an essential ingredient for any doctoral thesis -- out of it.

So, can Louie Guy Sigg move to Mutters, Colorado, a town he's never seen before and get himself elected to its council? Can Louie at least do well enough in the upcoming election that the resulting thesis earns a doctorate in political science and more importantly, starts a career in a country where campaigns are becoming more and more professional?

It all starts here at a meager convention center lined with banners that tout, "City Decision -- Meet Your Candidates." On this Saturday afternoon, a lot of townsfolk are doing just that.

Of course, a carnival atmosphere helps that along. Booths, lining spiraling alleys, offer games, food, readings, and other forms of entertainment. In between, portable tables form squares dotted with soapboxes. Yep -- Louie grins -- real soapboxes, replicas, of course, but copies of the real thing, as he knows from his paper on these makeshift podia -- his first published paper. The tables bear plastic water towers with leaking spouts and ranks of brochures with little apparent order. In this setting -- so drab compared to the surrounding booths -- candidates huckster themselves to crowds of varying sizes.

The toothpick wears on him, alternately provoking a bit of drool and drying his skin to nearly cracking. Louie plucks it out and peers at the sliver of wood. Somehow, in the American cultural milieu, it punctuates a folksy image, so he's adopted it as a way to stand out in the crowd of candidates. He just hopes it works that way, slides it carefully back into the other corner of his mouth, and continues his tour of the competition.

His only hurdle: residency. That's why he chose Mutters. As a way to keep young people "on the ranch", maybe even attract new ones, this small "home-rule municipality" on the arid plateau of western Colorado had annexed fifty square miles and set residency to sixty days.

By the time of the election, Louie would have lived in the town long enough, but could he work its politics well enough to partly govern it as well? Regardless, he would have all the research a top-notch thesis would need, and that was all he cared about right now.